


Riddle Me

by bugsuit



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:04:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugsuit/pseuds/bugsuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The legends tell of a lightning-fast monster with huge black eyes, one which can multiply itself into many and destroy with a jagged claw that rends carapace." Dave Strider does a quest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riddle Me

The legends tell of a lightning-fast monster with huge black eyes, one which can multiply itself into many and destroy with a jagged claw that rends carapace.

He ignores the legends. It’s a load of horseshit made up by the consorts; he’s used to the game by now and how it works and you don’t just go against how it’s coded and drop in something completely different. The story doesn’t fit, like it’s a piece of a puzzle placed in the wrong box. Rose is an asshole for telling him to go do this piece of shit quest.

It sounds more like something out of Silent Hill, maybe, or Dead Space. Dave waves off the enthusiastic consorts as they clamour around him. One tugs on his sleeve and waves a piece of paper and a pen in his face, but he’s not in the mood for autographs right now; he has a quest to finish.

The prize is supposed to be one of the monster’s own claws. He figures it’s probably a gimmick. Maybe when he gets down there it’ll be a dinky little shop with a crocodile in a fake moustache trying to sell LOHAC souvenirs for extortionate prices.

Dave follows the wall with his hand. The torches are still going, but they’re spaced just a little too far and sometimes the spiral stairs will fade into blackness before there’s a glimpse of orange light around the corner.

There was a consort following him until a few turns back, but it’s gone now. Terrified out of its little croco-wits, no doubt. Really, it’s ridiculous that anyone would believe this crap.

A monster with black eyes. A Prospitian? He’s pretty sure they have black eyes.

But they don’t have claws, and there sure are a lot of them but he’s not even sure if they can multiply like that in the _normal_ sense, never mind in some supernatural way.

He’s humouring the consorts by trying to guess, of course. It’s a good way of passing the time when you just seem to be going deeper and deeper into the core of LOHAC. Dave works out that he must be way below lava level by now, and he’s surprised the steps are going down this far at all – he always just assumed LOHAC was magma the whole way through. Maybe there’s lava just on the other side of the wall, a few thick bricks away from his hand. They’re certainly hot enough.

Maybe the beast swims in lava. It could be one of those boss battles you get at the end of a volcano level on basically any video game ever, where you have to jump the platforms and throw a lot of rocks and make sure you don’t burn to death.

But that wasn’t mentioned in the legend.

Dave tries to picture it in his head, and misses a step with a lurch of his stomach. The two are unrelated. If he were actually afraid of this thing he’d be shaking like a leaf by now. Oh no, it’s too horrible, the Knight can’t slay the dragon after all – and then Terezi laughs him out of LOHAC.

He’s tried asking her about the stories. She says they’re real, but then Terezi said that about dragons too and he’s pretty sure she was pulling his leg with that one. Just another example of them fucking with each other about their respective upbringing, applied in no constructive direction whatsoever, for the sake of laughing about just how crappy of an impression they’d managed to give each other when the cat gets let out of the bag later.

The image he formed of the beast earlier is still kind of wedged at the back of his mind. He remembers reading something about a basilisk image a long time ago, something that fucked with your head and then you remembered later and just thinking about it gave you a nasty seizure and… you spewed blood out of your eyes or something. He made that last part up. He wasn’t sure how they worked, really.

He’s pretty sure it’s not going to look anything like what he thought of. Probably more obvious, with fifty per cent fewer polygons. He wonders if his imagination is really more fucked up than what the game can throw at him, and then has second thoughts.

His foot hits the floor before he expects it to, and with an experimental nudge from his other foot he finds that the stairs have ended and he’s found level ground. Some small part of him is ironically proud of the fact he made it all the way without falling like an artefact-ridden douchebag with a huge ass.

There’s a torch up ahead and after trying and failing to pull it loose he just slices it off the wall. He’ll take this one with him. Whoever designed this piece of shit dungeon or temple or whatever definitely didn’t pour enough funding into the lighting department.

The corridor opens out into a spacious room with, if he holds his torch up high enough to see, some kind of big design on the back wall.

There’s no monster in sight, and Dave feels himself relax when he didn’t even realise he was tense in the first place. Hell, he _wasn’t_ , and he’ll stick to that story if anyone ever asks.

Dave steps up to the wall and examines it from bottom to top, and then back again. He blows on it, and a wall of stone dust billows out from the engravings.

It’s full of carvings of him.

Eerie as fuck, he thinks, and steps back and holds his torch up higher to see the whole thing at once. One section of the wall shows him cutting a swathe through an army of imps. Another shows him in a big pot surrounded by consorts – nice – and another depicts him slicing a giclops’ head clean off.

There’s an engraving of his record symbol dead-centre, and Dave figures that’s as good a clue as he’s going to get, so he grips the torch horizontally in his teeth (the wood tastes earthy and splinters around his canines) and gently brushes his fingertips against the centre.

Nothing happens, so he presses on it. This does absolutely fuck all compared to what he expected, but it shifts a miniscule amount under his palm, like it’s not meant to be pushed but _turned,_ and he remembers what records do in the first place.

Dave slides his fingers around the outer part of the symbol like he’s some ancient stone-age DJ, and the wall rumbles as the symbol makes a quarter-turn and then clicks inwards.

The whole engraving splits in a jagged line (he’s getting a little sick of the ‘broken record’ motifs playing over and over like a broken goddamn record) and slides into the wall on either side, and he steps forwards and nearly shits himself.

The broken sword lying on a dais in front of him is exactly as gimmicky as he imagined it would be. He has better weapons already, and even if he can maybe alchemise something useful out of it later he’s tempted to just call the whole thing a waste of time and leave the damn thing where it is.

But the carving on the back wall tells him exactly what he wasn’t expecting, for once, and he passes the sword to hold up the torch and just give a low whistle through his teeth.

It’s him again, but this time there are several of him in one image, dynamic fucking zig-zags carved all over the place behind his feet and swords to show movement. There’s a big image of him in the middle, holding his jagged sword up as if to strike something, and every pair of sunglasses carved into the reddish bricks is daubed with black paint.

Later, Dave will tell Rose he met the multiplying monster with the huge black eyes and the jagged claw, and when she calmly asks him if he’s slain the beast, with a faint smile on her face, he just answers of course not, he left well enough the fuck alone. She says she’s glad he found it interesting.


End file.
